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Apps are a terrific way of enhancing your Nokia Lumia experience. They are fun to use and, very often, give your smartphone a completely new function that it couldn’t do before!

I’m sure that even long-time Lumia owners are still regularly coming across new apps in the Windows Phone Store that can both surprise and delight them.

Apps you can depend on

This is not a round-up of glamorous or astonishing apps that will blow your mind and make you want to tell your friends about them. There’s nothing here that will transform your Lumia into a Space Shuttle controller.

Instead, they are the quiet and dependable apps that will probably go mostly unnoticed in the background. Until, that is, you really need them. System apps are the little shortcuts to help you get the most of your Lumia.

We know that many of you have recently got your hands on a Nokia Lumia 920, Lumia 820 or Lumia 620. Here are some system apps that should be among the first things you consider downloading from the Windows Phone Store.

Toggling your connectivity options such as WiFi, Bluetooth, location services and cellular data is a smart way of conserving your Lumia’s battery life.

This app provides shortcuts to all these settings on your smartphone and also includes the Flight Mode option as well.

The entire app can be pinned to your Start screen or if you need to access to one option more often than the others, such as the WiFi setting, then that can be pinned individually to your Start screen.

The Live Tiles can be customised to match your accent colours and will also tell you the current state of your connectivity options.

I can’t imagine many people will need to test their connection speed every day but it’s certainly that you may be interested in knowing.

This is particularly true if you’re using a Nokia Lumia 920 or Lumia 820 on a high-speed 4G network. Maybe you could show your friends its connection speed and show them what they’re missing out on!

Install this attractive and simple to use app and find out your download and upload speeds in around 30 seconds. If you want to check your cellular data speed then you’ll need to turn off your WiFi first – otherwise you’ll be measuring your WiFi connection.

It will also save your results so you can see how your speed varies over time and by location. Call it geeky if you will, but I love this sort of thing. It’s useful as well if you’re considering downloading a large file to your Lumia.

There are plenty of flashlight applications in the Windows Phone Store but this is one of the most highly-rated and popular ones.

It turns your camera’s flash into a torch and has a compass for all those times when you’re lost outside in the dark and need to get your bearings. If you find yourself in lots of trouble then you can use the SOS mode.

It locks underneath your lock screen and has a couple of other nice features such as shake to toggle on and off. Again, it’s not an app that you’ll be playing with on the bus to work but it’s extremely useful to have on your Lumia nonetheless.